STANISLAW LEM MADE HARD SCIENCE AND DEEP PHILOSOPHY INTO SOME OF THE GREATEST SCIENCE FICTION YOU'VE NEVER SEEN. NOW HIS CLASSIC SOLARIS IS GETTING THE HOLLYWOOD TREATMENT.

Stanislaw Lem has never been beloved by the science fiction establishment. Philip K. Dick accused him of being a communist agent. Members of the Science Fiction Writers Association booted him from their group. And no wonder: Lem has denounced popular sci-fi as trivial pulp produced by mental weaklings. Science fiction, he once wrote, "is a whore," prostituting itself "with discomfort, disgust, and contrary to its dreams and hopes." But strained relations with his peers hasn't tarnished Lem's career. The author of dozens of books translated into 40 languages, he is considered among the greatest sci-fi writers of all time.

So why is it that Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke are household names, but Stanislaw Lem remains unknown to so many Americans? Start with the obvious: Lem writes in Polish. His most important books have never appeared in English. Even his best-known novel, Solaris, is available in US bookstores only as an English translation of a French abridgement of the Polish original. Yet the main reason Lem's never become established here is that his wit has always been too cruel, his love of science too prominent, his outlook too cerebral to fit easily into a publishing niche devoted to fairy-tale adventures and timeworn astronaut yarns.

Now Lem is getting a shot at fame in the US. In late November, 20th Century Fox releases a remake of Solaris. Produced by James Cameron (Titanic, The Terminator), directed by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich), and starring George Clooney, the movie has the pedigree of a Hollywood blockbuster. Soderbergh promises "a cross between 2001 and Last Tango in Paris."

Lem, now 81 and living in Krakow, is skeptical. "If the Americans turn my novel into something bizarre, I won't be very much surprised," he tells me. The first Solaris appeared in 1972, the work of the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. And though the film won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, Lem never cared for Tarkovsky's take. "We were like a pair of harnessed horses - each pulling the cart in the opposite direction," he says. In the US, the film never broke out of the art house circuit. The only way to see it was on video or in half-empty theaters, the film's haunting score rasping out through secondhand speakers.

Hollywood's Solaris has the muscle to pack theaters - but Lem's expectations are no higher this time around. "I had doubts about whether I should sell the rights for Solaris in the US," Lem says. "But at a certain point I said to myself: 'I am old; I shall refrain from always saying no.' Now it's past the point of no return, and there is nothing I can do about it."

Lem may be dubious, but his American fans are hopeful. With Soderbergh's picture, the science fiction genius may finally get the recognition he deserves.

Solaris was published in 1961. Lem was living in Krakow at the time, and had already made a name for himself in Poland and Russia. The book's plot fits squarely into the tradition extending from The War of the Worlds to Star Trek to E.T.: Mankind encounters a mysterious nonhuman intelligence. The novel opens with a scientific debate over whether the peculiar ocean covering the planet Solaris is alive - perhaps even intelligent. Scientists have observed complex patterns of behavior, including an orbit that seems to self-correct. But since nothing of the ocean resembles human biochemistry, never mind psychology, its sentience is hard to establish.

The story's hero - an overly objective psychologist named Kris Kelvin - is dispatched to a station orbiting the planet. When he arrives, he discovers that a scientist has committed suicide and the others are in a state of nervous collapse. The planet appears to be reading their minds, and the station is populated with apparitions that correspond to aspects of the researchers' fantasies. Soon after his arrival, Kelvin finds himself face-to-face with his dead wife, who seems human in most ways. With this encounter, the challenge of evaluating the nonhuman intelligence of the ocean suddenly becomes, for Kelvin, emotionally tangled. This is similar territory to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that became Blade Runner. But where Dick (and director Ridley Scott) was satisfied with an eerie thriller, Lem slyly threads together psychology with philosophy until every commonsense idea about what constitutes a person is undermined.

It's classic Lem - an intellectual puzzle without the usual sci-fi crutches: shoot-outs, colonial rebellions, intergalactic battles in which a brave young officer overcomes his fear to become a man. Lem prefers comic speculations that dive deep into the social and ideological underpinnings of science. His stories are full of inventors and robots endowed with a disturbing capacity for reflection. Lem follows each idea to its logical extreme: drugs so convincing that reality disappears, computers too intelligent to be of any use.

Such rigor has earned Lem the respect of many academics, especially those whose work involves speculation about machine intelligence. AI experts Marvin Minsky and Douglas Hofstadter once invited the author to visit MIT, but Lem refused, claiming he didn't like disappointing readers who expected an extraordinary personality behind the extraordinary tales. John McCarthy, a longtime Stanford computer scientist, is a fan of Lem's Imaginary Magnitude. That title and A Perfect Vacuum consist, respectively, of prefaces to and reviews of never-written books; these invented works of future science include an account of bacteria that have been taught Morse code and a Nobel speech describing how civilizations in different parts of the universe cooperate without being able to communicate. The books are dry, full of scientific neologisms, but extremely funny and thought-provoking.

Born in 1921 in Lwów, Poland, Lem was a curious child, the type of boy who played with his toys by dissecting them. As a teenager, he was inspired by the classic works of H. G. Wells, who used science fiction as a means of social criticism.

Lem, whose family was of Jewish ancestry, survived the Nazi occupation by a combination of luck and deceit. He worked under a false identity as a welder in a German-owned firm that recycled raw materials, a position that gave him a chance to pass materials to the Polish resistance. When his cover was blown, he went into hiding, resurfacing when the Red army arrived in 1944. After the war, Lem studied medicine but declined to finish his degree, since doctors were prime candidates for the postwar draft. Instead, he turned to science, taking a position at Konwersatorium Naukoznawcze, a Krakow-based research institute. That decision set the wheels of his bumpy career in motion.

Because he was fluent in German and French, and - through great effort - literate in English, Lem wrote reviews of foreign scientific journals for the monthly Zycie Nauki. He also experimented with fiction. At the time, modern American and European sci-fi was scarce in Eastern Europe, and he was utterly unaware of contemporary authors. He was, in his own words, "like Robinson Crusoe on his island." He assumed that he had colleagues in America and that, like him, they were exploring the nature of technological progress and its effects on civilization.

But postwar Poland was an uncomfortable place for free-thinking intellectuals, and Lem clashed with officialdom. He wrote his first novel - Hospital of the Transfiguration - in 1948; it failed to pass Party muster. Lem ran into similar problems with The Magellan Nebula, a novel inspired by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. Wiener's research in cybernetics promised a way to control devices, factories, and even communities, raising hopes of social and industrial transformations powered by thinking machines. However, in communist Poland, cybernetics was considered fallacious pseudoscience.

It wasn't until the mid-'50s - after Stalin's death - that Lem's writing career took off. Hospital of the Transfiguration finally came out in 1955, the same year as The Magellan Nebula. Lem began publishing at a furious pace, producing a new book and sometimes two almost every year. He earned honors in Poland and gained a following in Russia and Germany, where his books would sell millions of copies.

In the intellectual thaw, American science fiction became available for the first time. When Lem had a chance to catch up with what his Western counterparts were up to, he was horrified. Science fiction, he discovered, consisted mainly of fantasy and adventure without a shred of seriousness.

Lem set out to reform the genre. In the '60s and '70s, he wrote a series of essays lambasting what he considered the intellectual poverty of most science fiction, taking even its most famous authors to task for their technical ignorance, literary clumsiness, and sociological naïveté. He filled dozens of pages of academic journals such as Science Fiction Studies with dense arguments of how sci-fi was failing to meet its potential.

It was his literary antagonism that got him kicked out of the Science Fiction Writers Association in 1976. Philip K. Dick, who by then was suffering from mental illness, informed the FBI that Lem was a "Party functionary." It was a ridiculous charge, but it seemed to feed the animosities of the day.

After the clash, the remarkable pace of Lem's writing slowed, and he stopped producing sci-fi criticism altogether, deciding it was wasted effort.

The main problem with Lem's lonely attempt to elevate the genre was that his targets were unreformable. Despite intermittent complaints about not being taken seriously by the literary elite, most science fiction authors are firm believers in the verdict of the marketplace, eager to deliver compelling stories that will sell big. But, as Bruce Sterling writes, "for Lem science fiction is a documented form of thought-experiment: a spearhead of cognition. All else is secondary, and it is this singleness of aim that gives his work its driving power. This is truly a literature of ideas, dismissing the heart as trivial, but piercing the skull like an ice pick."

In the end, this is the source of Lem's uneasy relationship with American science fiction, and of his inevitable misalliance with Hollywood. Lem's stories are about humanity in general. Movies - at least popular ones - are about characters.

Moreover, when confronted with a beautiful woman who may be a phantom, an alien, or some kind of machine, Hollywood is more or less required to put one question ahead of all others: Can you have sex with it? This is what Soderbergh refers to when he says the movie will be a cross between 2001 and Last Tango in Paris.

Lem's Solaris ends ambiguously: The phantom disappears, and the scientist is left both fearing and hoping for her return. In a late version of the script obtained by Wired (which may or may not correspond to the movie's final cut), a hyper-Californian point of view triumphs, and the hero and his reborn mate are united inside Solaris, a psychosexual paradise that heals all wounds. It cuts back and forth from past to present, matching Earth sex with alien sex in an erotic montage. In the last moments, the planet itself glows with pleasure as Kelvin and his "wife" find true happiness in each other's arms. It's the perfect ending for a dime-store romance - or the most trivial science fiction story.

But perhaps it's fitting that Solaris - translated into French, then abridged, then retranslated into English, then reworked as a screenplay, sent through the Hollywood development process, and served up as a congenial fairy tale - is the story by which Lem will become known in America. During the past half-century, Lem has written about all kinds of fantastic inventions - robots, surveillance operations, matchmaking devices, governance by drugs, governance by computers, terrorism by laughter and by potions that make you hiccup without stopping. His stories involve accidents, malfunctions, misinterpretations, mistakes of perception, dogmatic blindness. A person encounters a system, and the results of the encounter reveal the limits of both. Now, 40 years after its publication, Lem's own book has gotten away from him, like some small mechanism in a wayward machine.